With Analia comfortably settled into her new home, a two room house a few blocks away from the workshop that was costing her seven dakars a month, Nym left the pair of them to their work and returned to Archmage Veran’s sanctum. His own studies were progressing somewhat smoothly, though he was still failing to bore through the fourth layer. He could, if he wanted, pull in the arcana, though it was practically unusable in its base form.
There were techniques to learn how to process it, but material was scarce on the subject. Those few humans who’d reached the fourth layer universally agreed that it wasn’t worth it. Based on the brief communication he’d gotten from his own past self, it seemed that ascendants also backed that philosophy.
So Nym did not spend time learning to harness fourth layer arcana. Instead, he sharpened his willpower with practice and researched some of the more esoteric physical and mental enhancement alterations he could make to further help. Archmage Veran was a considerable help in both planning out a set of enhancements and helping him implement them.
Nym spent so much time working on his own progress that he became something of a hermit, with days or weeks going by between visits to his friends. They were all weathering the winter months in relative comfort thanks to the southern climates, and though snow piled up in Abilanth, Thrakus, and a dozen other northern cities, Nym was perfectly comfortable in his room.
His life could only remain warm and uneventful for so long, of course. One day while he was poking through some of the upper shelves of the library, Archmage Veran appeared in the room and peered at him. “Nym, I need a favor,” he called up.
He shelved the book he’d been flipping through and flew down to the floor. “What’s up?”
“I need a capable combat mage to chaperone a class at the Academy. They’re going on a field trip to Glacial Valley to get some experience with elemental water using an ice aspected filter. It shouldn’t be too dangerous, but there are some hostile creatures living in the area, and we’d like to keep our students alive.”
“Glacial Valley… that sounds familiar.”
“The region is rather famous as one of the best training locations for water mages seeking to learn ice magic. That’s why we take classes out there regularly.”
“No.” Nym frowned. “Something else. I can’t remember what though. I guess it’s not important. So I just meet the class there and keep an eye on them to make sure they don’t get eaten by an ice worm.”
“Ice worm? Hmm? Oh, you mean a tecula? It’s possible, but I consider it unlikely. We had a hive south of here last winter, which is the first time that’s happened ever, as far as we’re aware. It was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence.”
Nym snorted. “Lucky me,” he muttered. “What kind of threats are you worried about then?”
“Bighorn yetis are the most common nuisance. They’re difficult to spot with sight alone and they’re voracious meat eaters. Fortunately, they’re territorial and solitary outside of mating season, which this isn’t, so you’re not likely to encounter more than one. Professor Lakton knows what to look out for, so your job will mostly be to attack any dangers she points out.”
“Seems easy enough.”
“I’m glad you think so. The class leaves tomorrow morning from the Academy teleportation grounds, and the trip lasts three days. I suggest dressing warmly and bringing something to do. If all goes well, you’ll be bored out of your mind the whole time. The Academy itself will provide food and shelter for everyone.”
“I’ll have to do a bit of shopping. I don’t think I own any warm clothes anymore,” he said. He’d kept five crests back from the funds he’d given Analia and Cern, more than enough to cover the costs. Usually he just used a thermal barrier if he needed to go out in the cold weather, and most of his time outside the sanctum was spent far to the south.
Nym teleported himself to Abilanth. Technically he still didn’t have a license, which he supposed he should take care of at some point, though he’d more or less lost interest once Ebalsan had collapsed and the whole region had descended into lawlessness. With no one around to call him out for unlicensed use of magic, he’d started using it for anything and everything.
Going to another country that didn’t restrict magic usage hadn’t helped with the casual mindset, so when he appeared in Abilanth in front of the mages guildhall, he momentarily forgot that the laws were different there.
A nearby man flinched so hard he bumped into the woman he was walking next to, practically knocking her into the snow. “Hey!” he demanded, tossing a glare at Nym. “That was incredibly rude!”
“I’m sorry,” Nym said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“See here,” the man said, completely ignoring his companion, who was still climbing back to her feet and was covered in snow. “Do you even have a license, a kid as young as you?”
That didn’t take long to get busted. Before he could say anything, the woman grabbed hold of the man and hissed, “Shut up! Teleportation is a third circle spell. He’s a master mage!”
The man’s face paled and his attitude instantly flipped. “My apologies, sir. I didn’t realize. It was wrong of me to question you.”
Bemused, Nym nodded along. “It’s fine. Really. I should have appeared higher up so I didn’t startle anyone. That was careless of me.”
“No, no, not at all.”
“Here, let me at least get you cleaned up.” Nym grabbed hold of the snow coating the woman with hydrokinesis and swept it away. “There we go. Now, if you don’t mind, I have somewhere else to be.”
Nym hustled away from the pair, extremely conscious of their eyes on his back. Before he turned the corner, a mage stepped out of the guildhall and started talking to them. Nym wasn’t looking to chat with anyone, especially after his unlicensed use of magic. If he could have, he would have preferred to teleport in somewhere else, but the guildhall was the only place in the middle ring he was familiar enough with to teleport to and he didn’t want to deal with the district gate checks.
It took a bit of looking around to jog his memory, but he did eventually find a tailor’s shop. He couldn’t remember if it was the same one he’d originally visited over a year ago, not that it mattered. They had a fine selection of winter clothes. Nym purchased two, had his measurements taken, and tipped extra to have them done before the shop closed for the evening.
Then he found a leather worker and bought new shoes and a coat trimmed in fur. Shoes were a constant pain to him, something he spent more money on than anything else it seemed. He’d grown so much that he’d had to replace his shoes four times already, and he’d spent half his time barefoot! Getting new shoes was a familiar process, and he at least saved a bit of money by selling his old ones back. Since they were so often barely worn, being only a few months old, he generally got a decent price.
He returned to the sanctum late that evening, a new pack hanging from a strap off his shoulder. In it were two winter outfits, a book on advanced rune sequences, and a second book detailing some of the rarer plants that grew in extreme cold climates and were prized by alchemists. He didn’t expect to find anything since he’d have to stay close to the class, but it didn’t hurt to know what to look for, just in case.
His own library was pitiful compared to the grand thing that made up two whole floors in the archmage’s sanctum. Honestly, it was pitiful compared to just about anything, being only a single shelf with nine books on it. Nym placed the rune sequences book on it, up to ten now, next to the other two he had devoted to the craft, and settled down to begin reading about winter plants.
* * *
“Is the sun even up yet?” one of the students groused, peering up at the cloud-covered sky.
Nym agreed with the sentiment, but he kept his mouth shut. Some of the students here were older than he looked, and more than a few had shot curious glances at him. They were all dressed in Academy-standard winter robes with slight color variations, though Nym hadn’t worked out quite what that signified.
He, on the other hand, was wearing a plain if well-made set of clothes with none of the ornamentation or heraldry a wealthy mage usually sported. His hair was long enough after a year without getting it cut that he could tie it back, though he knew he really should see a barber. At this point, he was only resisting a haircut because it was starting to drive Ophelia up the wall.
A woman in her thirties or forties appeared from a nearby building and marched over to the group. Arcana swept the path in front of her, pushing any snow off to the side and leaving her with a clear stretch of stone. As she walked, her eyes scanned the assembled students, then turned to Nym.
“You are the chaperone?” she asked, stopping in front of him.
“I am.”
“My name is Professor Lakton.”
“Nym.”
“It is a pleasure to meet you, Nym. I’ll be honest, normally I’d have a lot of reservations about someone so young, especially someone who isn’t even Academy-trained, but when the headmaster personally vouches for you, well, you take it on faith.”
It certainly didn’t seem like she was taking anything on faith, considering all the divination spells he could see in her aura, but Nym let it pass. He knew what he looked like, and he was just happy that people had stopped questioning him at every turn. Just six months ago, it had been a never-ending struggle to get an adult to take him seriously. Now they were just a bit skeptical.
“We’ll talk more later,” Professor Lakton said. “For now, I’ve got to get this lot moving before we miss our time slot.”
Without waiting for an answer, she strode over to where the students were huddled against the cold and raised her voice. “Everyone is here? Good. Start heading to the teleportation platform. We’ll be outbound in ten minutes.”
The entire class trudged through the snow in the pre-dawn shadows to a squat building on the north end of the courtyard. It had a formidable set of wards on it, already active. If Nym understood them correctly, they were designed to siphon arcana to power the teleportation platform, which seemed like a round-about way of doing things, but he supposed if they didn’t have dedicated operators to power them, it made sense.
Once inside the building, he could feel the wards tugging at him, looking for arcana. The sensation was mildly unpleasant, and apparently prevalent enough that even the regular students could feel it. Almost immediately, arcana auras sprang up in the crowd. The wards snatched at it, pulling away long strands as the students let them loose and funneling them to the largest platform Nym had ever seen.
It was a twenty-foot circle, probably with about four times the surface area of the standard platforms he’d used in the past. With something that big, it made sense it had a ward scheme designed to pull from multiple sources. An average person would run themselves dry trying to power it.
Nym let out his own stream of second layer arcana for the wards to catch, and within thirty seconds, the platform came to life. The professor’s eyebrows shot up and she gave Nym a covert glance before ushering the students and their chaperone onto the platform. Then she activated a set of runes inscribed on a control panel, and the whole thing started humming.
Three seconds later, the world pinched around him and everything went dark. When sight returned, they were standing on an identical platform in a room made of blue stone.
“God’s shriveled sac it’s cold!” someone cursed.
Nym whole-heartedly agreed and immediately put up a thermal barrier. Even with the new clothes, he suspected he’d be using that spell frequently for the next few days.
With Analia comfortably settled into her new home, a two room house a few blocks away from the workshop that was costing her seven dakars a month, Nym left the pair of them to their work and returned to Archmage Veran’s sanctum. His own studies were progressing somewhat smoothly, though he was still failing to bore through the fourth layer. He could, if he wanted, pull in the arcana, though it was practically unusable in its base form.
There were techniques to learn how to process it, but material was scarce on the subject. Those few humans who’d reached the fourth layer universally agreed that it wasn’t worth it. Based on the brief communication he’d gotten from his own past self, it seemed that ascendants also backed that philosophy.
So Nym did not spend time learning to harness fourth layer arcana. Instead, he sharpened his willpower with practice and researched some of the more esoteric physical and mental enhancement alterations he could make to further help. Archmage Veran was a considerable help in both planning out a set of enhancements and helping him implement them.
Nym spent so much time working on his own progress that he became something of a hermit, with days or weeks going by between visits to his friends. They were all weathering the winter months in relative comfort thanks to the southern climates, and though snow piled up in Abilanth, Thrakus, and a dozen other northern cities, Nym was perfectly comfortable in his room.
His life could only remain warm and uneventful for so long, of course. One day while he was poking through some of the upper shelves of the library, Archmage Veran appeared in the room and peered at him. “Nym, I need a favor,” he called up.
He shelved the book he’d been flipping through and flew down to the floor. “What’s up?”
“I need a capable combat mage to chaperone a class at the Academy. They’re going on a field trip to Glacial Valley to get some experience with elemental water using an ice aspected filter. It shouldn’t be too dangerous, but there are some hostile creatures living in the area, and we’d like to keep our students alive.”
“Glacial Valley… that sounds familiar.”
“The region is rather famous as one of the best training locations for water mages seeking to learn ice magic. That’s why we take classes out there regularly.”
“No.” Nym frowned. “Something else. I can’t remember what though. I guess it’s not important. So I just meet the class there and keep an eye on them to make sure they don’t get eaten by an ice worm.”
“Ice worm? Hmm? Oh, you mean a tecula? It’s possible, but I consider it unlikely. We had a hive south of here last winter, which is the first time that’s happened ever, as far as we’re aware. It was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence.”
Nym snorted. “Lucky me,” he muttered. “What kind of threats are you worried about then?”
“Bighorn yetis are the most common nuisance. They’re difficult to spot with sight alone and they’re voracious meat eaters. Fortunately, they’re territorial and solitary outside of mating season, which this isn’t, so you’re not likely to encounter more than one. Professor Lakton knows what to look out for, so your job will mostly be to attack any dangers she points out.”
“Seems easy enough.”
“I’m glad you think so. The class leaves tomorrow morning from the Academy teleportation grounds, and the trip lasts three days. I suggest dressing warmly and bringing something to do. If all goes well, you’ll be bored out of your mind the whole time. The Academy itself will provide food and shelter for everyone.”
“I’ll have to do a bit of shopping. I don’t think I own any warm clothes anymore,” he said. He’d kept five crests back from the funds he’d given Analia and Cern, more than enough to cover the costs. Usually he just used a thermal barrier if he needed to go out in the cold weather, and most of his time outside the sanctum was spent far to the south.
Nym teleported himself to Abilanth. Technically he still didn’t have a license, which he supposed he should take care of at some point, though he’d more or less lost interest once Ebalsan had collapsed and the whole region had descended into lawlessness. With no one around to call him out for unlicensed use of magic, he’d started using it for anything and everything.
Going to another country that didn’t restrict magic usage hadn’t helped with the casual mindset, so when he appeared in Abilanth in front of the mages guildhall, he momentarily forgot that the laws were different there.
A nearby man flinched so hard he bumped into the woman he was walking next to, practically knocking her into the snow. “Hey!” he demanded, tossing a glare at Nym. “That was incredibly rude!”
“I’m sorry,” Nym said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“See here,” the man said, completely ignoring his companion, who was still climbing back to her feet and was covered in snow. “Do you even have a license, a kid as young as you?”
That didn’t take long to get busted. Before he could say anything, the woman grabbed hold of the man and hissed, “Shut up! Teleportation is a third circle spell. He’s a master mage!”
The man’s face paled and his attitude instantly flipped. “My apologies, sir. I didn’t realize. It was wrong of me to question you.”
Bemused, Nym nodded along. “It’s fine. Really. I should have appeared higher up so I didn’t startle anyone. That was careless of me.”
“No, no, not at all.”
“Here, let me at least get you cleaned up.” Nym grabbed hold of the snow coating the woman with hydrokinesis and swept it away. “There we go. Now, if you don’t mind, I have somewhere else to be.”
Nym hustled away from the pair, extremely conscious of their eyes on his back. Before he turned the corner, a mage stepped out of the guildhall and started talking to them. Nym wasn’t looking to chat with anyone, especially after his unlicensed use of magic. If he could have, he would have preferred to teleport in somewhere else, but the guildhall was the only place in the middle ring he was familiar enough with to teleport to and he didn’t want to deal with the district gate checks.
It took a bit of looking around to jog his memory, but he did eventually find a tailor’s shop. He couldn’t remember if it was the same one he’d originally visited over a year ago, not that it mattered. They had a fine selection of winter clothes. Nym purchased two, had his measurements taken, and tipped extra to have them done before the shop closed for the evening.
Then he found a leather worker and bought new shoes and a coat trimmed in fur. Shoes were a constant pain to him, something he spent more money on than anything else it seemed. He’d grown so much that he’d had to replace his shoes four times already, and he’d spent half his time barefoot! Getting new shoes was a familiar process, and he at least saved a bit of money by selling his old ones back. Since they were so often barely worn, being only a few months old, he generally got a decent price.
He returned to the sanctum late that evening, a new pack hanging from a strap off his shoulder. In it were two winter outfits, a book on advanced rune sequences, and a second book detailing some of the rarer plants that grew in extreme cold climates and were prized by alchemists. He didn’t expect to find anything since he’d have to stay close to the class, but it didn’t hurt to know what to look for, just in case.
His own library was pitiful compared to the grand thing that made up two whole floors in the archmage’s sanctum. Honestly, it was pitiful compared to just about anything, being only a single shelf with nine books on it. Nym placed the rune sequences book on it, up to ten now, next to the other two he had devoted to the craft, and settled down to begin reading about winter plants.
* * *
“Is the sun even up yet?” one of the students groused, peering up at the cloud-covered sky.
Nym agreed with the sentiment, but he kept his mouth shut. Some of the students here were older than he looked, and more than a few had shot curious glances at him. They were all dressed in Academy-standard winter robes with slight color variations, though Nym hadn’t worked out quite what that signified.
He, on the other hand, was wearing a plain if well-made set of clothes with none of the ornamentation or heraldry a wealthy mage usually sported. His hair was long enough after a year without getting it cut that he could tie it back, though he knew he really should see a barber. At this point, he was only resisting a haircut because it was starting to drive Ophelia up the wall.
A woman in her thirties or forties appeared from a nearby building and marched over to the group. Arcana swept the path in front of her, pushing any snow off to the side and leaving her with a clear stretch of stone. As she walked, her eyes scanned the assembled students, then turned to Nym.
“You are the chaperone?” she asked, stopping in front of him.
“I am.”
“My name is Professor Lakton.”
“Nym.”
“It is a pleasure to meet you, Nym. I’ll be honest, normally I’d have a lot of reservations about someone so young, especially someone who isn’t even Academy-trained, but when the headmaster personally vouches for you, well, you take it on faith.”
It certainly didn’t seem like she was taking anything on faith, considering all the divination spells he could see in her aura, but Nym let it pass. He knew what he looked like, and he was just happy that people had stopped questioning him at every turn. Just six months ago, it had been a never-ending struggle to get an adult to take him seriously. Now they were just a bit skeptical.
“We’ll talk more later,” Professor Lakton said. “For now, I’ve got to get this lot moving before we miss our time slot.”
Without waiting for an answer, she strode over to where the students were huddled against the cold and raised her voice. “Everyone is here? Good. Start heading to the teleportation platform. We’ll be outbound in ten minutes.”
The entire class trudged through the snow in the pre-dawn shadows to a squat building on the north end of the courtyard. It had a formidable set of wards on it, already active. If Nym understood them correctly, they were designed to siphon arcana to power the teleportation platform, which seemed like a round-about way of doing things, but he supposed if they didn’t have dedicated operators to power them, it made sense.
Once inside the building, he could feel the wards tugging at him, looking for arcana. The sensation was mildly unpleasant, and apparently prevalent enough that even the regular students could feel it. Almost immediately, arcana auras sprang up in the crowd. The wards snatched at it, pulling away long strands as the students let them loose and funneling them to the largest platform Nym had ever seen.
It was a twenty-foot circle, probably with about four times the surface area of the standard platforms he’d used in the past. With something that big, it made sense it had a ward scheme designed to pull from multiple sources. An average person would run themselves dry trying to power it.
Nym let out his own stream of second layer arcana for the wards to catch, and within thirty seconds, the platform came to life. The professor’s eyebrows shot up and she gave Nym a covert glance before ushering the students and their chaperone onto the platform. Then she activated a set of runes inscribed on a control panel, and the whole thing started humming.
Three seconds later, the world pinched around him and everything went dark. When sight returned, they were standing on an identical platform in a room made of blue stone.
“God’s shriveled sac it’s cold!” someone cursed.
Nym whole-heartedly agreed and immediately put up a thermal barrier. Even with the new clothes, he suspected he’d be using that spell frequently for the next few days.
